Bomb stops two Colombia oil pipelines pumping

Pumping stopped on Tuesday on Colombia's largest and third-largest oil pipelines ...

Pumping stopped on Tuesday on Colombia's largest and third-largest oil pipelines -- Ocensa and Colombia -- as investigations proceeded into a suspected rebel bomb attack, the operating company said.
Pumping on the Ocensa and Colombia lines stopped during the afternoon, said a spokesman for Ocensa -- the British-Canadian-Colombian consortium which operates both pipes, which run parallel.

``We have suspended pumping. We still don't know if the attack has affected only one of the pipelines or both. We are waiting for the army to guarantee the safety of the area before going in to see what happened,'' the spokesman said.

The bomb attack, presumably carried out by leftist rebels, came in the northwestern province of Antioquia.

The 480-mile (800 km) Ocensa pipeline transports 365,000 barrels a day of crude from the Cusiana and Cupiagua fields in the northeastern province of Casanare to the Caribbean. The fields are operated by BP Amoco

The Colombia line transports 110,000 barrels a day.

The country's second largest pipeline, the 115,000-bpd Cano Limon, has been virtually paralyzed since Feb. 17 due to a sabotage campaign by rebels waging a 37-year-old war against the government.

The attacks on Cano Limon were largely responsible for a fall in Colombia's oil output to 560,400 barrels per day in May, down from 689,400 barrels per day in the same month of 2000.

The Ocensa pipeline was out of action for one day in March due to a bomb attack.

Colombia is Latin America's fifth-largest oil exporter and crude is the country's biggest